Actions from X AndradeMovable Type Pro 4.382013-04-24T16:00:36Zhttp://www.kcet.org/user/profile/RLSANTOYO/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=feed&_type=actions&username=X%20AndradePosted On Collecting and Translating Anthropology to Contemporary Art to Full Dollartag:www.kcet.org,2013:/socal/departures/community/fulldollar//1425.588352013-04-24T23:00:36Z2013-12-06T11:59:47ZEcuadorian artist/anthropologist X. Andrade reflects back on the Highland Park-based Full Dollar project, which turned out to be a two-year long project.X Andradehttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1425&id=2892
Since the mid-1990s I have developed an ethnographic interest in visual economies, by which I mean -- following anthropologist Deborah Poole -- the complex ways in which images are affected by being part of concrete processes of production, distribution, and consumption. They are a particular type of commodity, an object and a fetish that speaks in the language of desire and sensuality (Griselda Pollock), with meanings that always remain open to interpretation (Roland Barthes).

I was greatly influenced by a set of fruitful dialogues while studying anthropology at The New School For Social Research in New York City. Poole's course on Visual Cultures, Johannes Fabian's studies on vernacular painting and history in Zaire, Steve Caton's ethnographic approach to film, Terry Williams' attention to sexual images and the city, and Kevin Dwyer's work on dialogical anthropology were crucial to shaping my ethnographic view of images. In several of those courses, artists attended and actively participated in pushing the borders of their own practice. Among them, of foremost importance were my dialogues with Aleksandra Mir, by now a very well known name within the global art circuits. While in NYC, I contributed to Mir's Naming Tokyo, an alternative map of that city meant to convene idiosyncratic readings of constructed space and the politics behind labeling the urban gridlock.

]]>
During those years, the effects of images upon society became my main topic of inquiry. I started by conducting fieldwork on political pornography in Ecuador as a source for understanding populism as a widespread sociological phenomenon during the 1980s. My research focused on humorous, sexist, and obscene cartoons published in underground magazines -- which were largely read as a collective ritual. I was interested in the ways in which a certain textual and visual language contributed to the purposes of debunking dominant images of political power and democracy. Attending to readers' responses, I was amazed by the mix of both of laughter and repulsion that crude representations of the body politics created.

W.J.T. Mitchell has studied the capacity of visual images to awaken a range of social relations between viewers and objects, performing a function beyond representation. Mitchell discusses the paradox of images as inanimate objects that are capable of moving viewers -- to the point of offending them -- with sequences of censorship, rage, hate, and, of course, love and devotion. My readings of Mitchell opened up a series of questions regarding the effects of visual images upon concrete populations. Beyond the authenticity of images and their "dialectic" effects -- to quote Walter Benjamin's arguments to refer to the possibilities of understanding the presence of history in the present -- I became interested in questions about the value of sign painting and art, and subjects such as copy, mimesis, and serial production.

Later on, working against classic ethnography and being very much aware of both the textual turn in anthropology and the ethnographic turn in contemporary art, I came upon debates on drawing and photography by John Berger and Michael Taussig. While Berger opened up the possibility of thinking about drawing essentially as a process, a dialogic exercise between the artist and the thing drawn, Taussig's reflections on the thingness of drawing and mimetic power were crucial to think about the fetishistic nature of images and the spiritual life that lies underneath their materiality.

Calling upon notions of "sympathetic magic," originally stated in the early twentieth century by James Frazer on his studies on religion and animist thinking among "primitive societies" to explain the strong connection between image and its reference, Taussig goes beyond the utilitarian reason (the voodoo effect) in Frazer's theories. His reflections on the thingness of the image within anthropologists' fieldwork notebooks, and the system of exchange between images and texts, paved the way for my research on commodification, collecting practices, and value within the contemporary art world. W.J.T. Mitchell's questions on "what do pictures want?" and "why do images offend?" turned into consideration of the power of drawings in Taussig, eventually inspiring me to ask myself "what do sign paintings want?", that is, beyond their main advertising purposes. Do they trigger specific forms of social relations? What are their effects upon reconfiguring the urban space?

While contributing to the first photographic book project on sign painting in Ecuador in 2007, edited by graphic designer Juan Lorenzo Barragan, I met one master of this tradition, Victor Hugo Escalante, a.k.a. Don Pili. After discovering his commercial signs in restaurants and brothels all around Playas, a small coastal fishing town, I was struck by the playful relation he managed to establish between texts and images. The colorful night club Flor de Mexico, for instance, depicted a series of huge murals of semi-naked female models blossoming from its walls as conforming a garden of desire according to machista narratives. Taking as reference photographs widely available in magazines and Mexican comic books since the 1960s, Don Pili rendered them alive at a very different scale.

The idea of making a critical commentary on contemporary art global markets and the cult of authorship, the cult of objects and material culture in general, and the globalization of crude, market-based senses of value, made me think about the possibility of developing an ethnographic/artistic project on these issues. The language of sign painting seemed perfect for my purpose of rendering the practice of "collecting contemporary art" in the language of "popular culture."

Against the strategies of appropriation by established artists of images of advertising and publicity -- a long-standing trend present in surrealism and pop-art with recurrent shows in museums across the world for the past fifty years -- I saw my dialogue with a sign-painter as a method of dissecting power relations and notions of celebrity in the art world. I commissioned the reproduction of famous pieces authored by the elite of the global art world to be rendered as sign-paintings for hypothetical small-scale businesses. A total of two dozen pieces were created by Don Pili for Full Dollar, my anthropology-as-art enterprise since 2004, with the goal of being exhibited at a gallery space.

A project based on these premises was selected by Outpost for Contemporary Art in 2011 as part of its South American program cycle. Soon, Julie Deamer, Outpost's founder and at the time its director, took it upon herself to further develop the original method of the Ecuadorian iteration of The Full Dollar Collection of Contemporary Art for the purpose of fitting a community-oriented, arts-based project in the neighborhood of Highland Park, Los Angeles. The principle: a dialogue between sign painters and visual artists. The method: the establishment of a series of partnerships with relevant institutions in the field of communication and education to widen the potential visibility of the project. The location: the public space. The final outcome: four teams, each comprised of a sign painter, a visual artist, and a local business owner, and four murals that now act as arts-based storefront signage on York Boulevard.

Gradually, as a result of my virtual exchanges with Julie, my own role as an "artist" -- a label that I never use to refer to my work, since I see it as anthropological on its own -- was radically transformed for good. It was Julie who broadened the scope of the project, made it much more coherent within the social context in which it would take place, and made me aware of different visual traditions in the area. She redefined the method, making open discussion among different collaborators an essential aspect of it.

Additionally, the whole project flourished thanks to Juan Devis and KCET Departures, whose series gave me a greater understanding of the history of Highland Park and the debates on images in L.A. at large. They provided a web page to archive the project's multiple exchanges that echo debates on art in the Los Angeles area, make visible many different forms of sign painting, muralism, graffiti, street art, and other forms of advertising, and actively involve the students' community of Occidental College in an ambitious project: to make a photographic survey of York Boulevard and the surrounding areas. KCET's support along the way has been incredible, and I feel proud to have the whole history of the project there as a public archive of what we did over the last two years.

A major catalyst, besides Julie and Juan, was Maryam Hosseinzadeh, a strongly committed community member and a long-standing resident of Highland Park, who was later hired as a Project Manager by Outpost @ Armory. Along with Sinéad Finnerty-Pyne, Gallery Manager at Armory, the two facilitated meetings, held open discussions, and shepherded the final roster of participants. Sinéad and Maryam made major decisions in the field that were critical to accomplishing our main goals. It was a pleasure, and a learning experience, to work with both of them. They kindly showed me around and made me aware of the particular history of the neighborhood and its surroundings.

"A series of mistranslations", to quote Irene Tsatsos -- Armory's Gallery Director/Chief Curator, who was responsible for providing institutional support for my residency in Los Angeles and carrying The Collection through the end -- were key to understanding the many transformations that the project encountered. The notion of authorship was freely interpreted among the nearly fifty many participants involved in the project at one stage or another. Acknowledging the collective, participatory, dimension of this project, I allowed different cultural brokers to make crucial decisions, making my voice heard only when I felt that our critical mission was at risk of being derailed. The single basic methodological component on which I insisted was that the dominant power relations within the global art circuit (with its hierarchies regarding "art" and "craft") be subverted. In the end, sign painters would call the shots for the project to work properly.

From the beginning I wanted to work with artist Sandow Birk, whose work I found particularly interesting from an anthropological perspective. The fact that one of his mural projects in Boyle Heights was highly controversial to the point that it was banned from public display made his inclusion in the project even more urgent because I regard his work as politically committed. From my point of view, Sandow's research-based projects and his appropriation of graphic traditions formed a common ground with my own agenda.

Many thanks as well to Kardona, with whom I shared a day's work; Kimberley "The Window Goddess" Edwards; Noelle Reyes and Danell Hughes of Mi Vida; Kay Osorio of Awesome Playground and Marcos Perez of Digicolor, whom I met while in residence in Los Angeles in November, 2012; and to Anna Ialeggio, Shizu Saldamando, Martin Durazo, and Ruby Osorio. The signs that were created are a public homage to all of their efforts and understanding. I would especially like to acknowledge Julie Deamer, Juan Devis, Bill Kelley Jr., Tom Mackenzie, Ronald Lopez and Irene Tsatsos, and their commitment to fostering a type of art that can change society, even in small ways. On a very modest scale, this is what The Full Dollar Collection of Contemporary Art hopes to achieve by giving back to the Highland Park community an opportunity to rethink the multiple ways in which the urban space can be modified, while granting a proper place to historical elements of a given visual economy. This was the idea behind making this "collection" public.

A sign painting is normally the result of a person-to-person negotiation about advertising, but also about the role that images play in contemporary society. The murals in York Boulevard attest to the dialogic nature of this encounter, a marvelous tradition that is still very much alive in Los Angeles and certainly in Highland Park, a place filled with their magic.

See before and after photos of participating York Boulevard storefronts here.

]]>
Posted From Ecuador to Highland Park: A Dialogue with Julie Deamer to Full Dollartag:www.kcet.org,2011:/socal/departures/community/fulldollar//1425.382412011-09-16T21:00:33Z2011-09-21T22:29:36ZUrban anthropologist and artist X. Andrade talks with Julie Deamer, former Director of Outpost for Contemporary Art, about the Full Dollar project.X Andradehttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1425&id=2892

An e-mail exchange between me and Julie Deamer, the former director at Outpost for Contemporary Art, took place on May 5th, 2011. As it turned out, this dialogue was a key component to define the process of translation from one place to another in order to respond to the different challenges derived from diverse traditions, urban contexts, and power relations between art and sign-painting. New methods needed to be developed for the project to have an echo within the Highland Park community at large. At the same time, my main questions regarding irony and humor as powerful elements for the critique of the art world and collecting practices still seem unsolved by this act of translation:

]]>

Julie Deamer: We have been discussing a contextual question, wondering if the project ought to be adjusted in terms of how the sign painters and visual artists engage each other and the businesses. In Ecuador, if I'm not mistaken, the idea was in part inspired by the lack of
presence of contemporary art in Ecuador. This is not the case in Los Angeles, and the neighborhood where your residency will be based is home to a lot of visual artists, including well known artists like Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw. Given this contextual difference we thought it might be interesting to have the process and production of signs be more collaborative. To have the sign painters and visual artists conceptualize and paint the new work together as opposed to the sign painters selecting a particular work to reproduce and that being the extent of the involvement of the visual artists.

X. Andrade: In Ecuador, both the sign painting tradition and the contemporary art scene is different vis a vis L.A., one of the foremost important centers of art in the world. It is not just a matter of scale but of actual exclusion between sign painters and artists. There is a clearly defined boundary, one that quite simply is not crossed unless cheap labor is needed by a given artist. In my work with sign-painter Don Pili, I purposefully thought The Full Dollar Collection of Contemporary Art to be exhibited in a gallery. I'm still trying since it has not been shown in Ecuador yet, and I do not know if I will succeed at that. In the meantime, I have requested more pieces in order to convene the idea of an actual collection. If it gets exhibited or not, Don Pili keeps the authorship of the pieces, while I and Full Dollar remains the author of the concept. This is not just a matter of given visibility to a tradition but of intervening in the small art-circuit of ours, and advancing an anthropological critique on cultural institutions in my native country. At the same time, rendering "masterpieces" of global contemporary art in the language of sign-painting is, for me, making a critical commentary on the commodification of art world as such, and on the value given to "authenticity" in occidental societies as a key concept for advancing practices of collection. In Ecuador, the context of my practice both as an anthropologist and a citizen, we are talking about clear racial, class, and gender based frontiers between art and crafts. My project comment on that as well. Don Pili would never have a chance to be considered seriously at an institutional level. Even if I don't get a space, and I have to show the collection in the privacy of my flat, that makes me accomplish my purposes.

In L.A. you have a far more complex scene in terms of the mix of several traditions (Chicano muralism, sing-painting as such, street art, grafitti, and the art circuit of galleries and museums). Although power relations remain, actual border crossing is a fact or a possibility. Sign painters have access to established craft schools, are in touch with artists, participate of artist projects, even if their main survival strategy is creating signs under the commission of a business owner for commercial purposes. As the case of Highland Park shows, they can actually share the same urban spot as citizens. That is not the case back in Ecuador. My world and Don Pili's is separated, it simply just don't overlap.

Therefore, I totally agree with your suggestions, the project should take into account a different context, participation and dialogue between people involved from both ends (sign painting and contemporary art). This dialogue can be simpler because of a certain common background, a certain agreement about what is art to begin with. I open up to the possibility of generating signs in a more dialogical way, and we should preserve this strategy from beginning to end. Actually, artists and painters painting together is a great idea because it would engage the participation of visual artists in the actual production of signs, and vice versa (for the sign painters to create like artists). However, in one way or another, I would like to keep citations to contemporary art as evident as possible. After all, referring to established contemporary art is at the heart of this project. I see this as a project that is mainly based on appropriation (we should keep this as an open question for the people involved though, and I don't want to simply replicate the Ecuador formula).

JD: This points to another question - In Ecuador the sign painter translated very famous works of art. Should we try to engage well known LA artists generally regardless of their interest in working with communities or should our efforts be focused more on engaging
artists whose work is grounded in social practice?

XA: I will keep this strategy open: I do want to preserve a link between my ongoing project in Ecuador and famous, expensive art (therefore to negotiate with at least one or two superstars is a must), but we should also include community-oriented artists as a contribution and extension of their own work at Outpost. In the first case, i need to preserve the humorous and critical effect of the "defacing" of master pieces when they are translated into street signs. in the second case, a hybrid product could emerge. In both cases, I would need to familiarize myself with potential contributors. In fact, part of the research could bring to light the hierarchical order of art production in Highland Park (and the marginalization of street painters within that order, or not). Still, I'm aware that The Full Dollar Collection enters a second stage. From an original method developed between an anthropologist and a sign painter, to a participatory initiative that involves differently located social actors.

JD: We need to look at budgetary restraints and be realistic about what we can achieve. [The budget] would allow 5 signs to be produced.

XA:If we manage to produce 5 signs, depending upon their placement on key locations in the neighborhood, I think we can make a difference. Actual placement of the signs are key to this project's success. local business partners are key to the whole thing because they have the last word, not the artists. Which, in turn, has a consequence on the type of artists who are willing to play this game, which for me is essential to keep: there is a new hierarchy emerging for The Collection to be made in Highland Park. Owners which maintain a certain power as characterizes their interaction with painters, painters will have power to give artists' pieces a spin of their own, and artists will have to have a real, common ground, one constructed by ongoing conversations amongst whom will participate. In essence, artists should be at the very same level than sign painters. And both will have to have the blessing of a small business owner.

JD: In terms of execution, rather than painting signs on a piece of wood and then installing that onto a business' facade, we'd like to propose having the signs painted directly onto the facades of the businesses. This will cut a number of steps out of the production and
also help keep costs down.

XA: Definitely, that is the way to go, and that is exactly what I have in mind. Again, local business willing to play the game and refashion their own facades are of foremost importance to the full realization of this project's goals. The actual size of the L.A. series, therefore, will depend upon negotiations with the city and business owners. In the process, a decision needs to be made about their placement on either one single strip or street segment, or on several, rather disperse, locations.

I think we are pretty much on the same page, Julie, and I'm truly excited about this collaboration. I see myself only as a catalyzer of a social process of dialogue between differentially situated actors (Outpost, artists, art critics, sign painters, college students, and local owners). As long as "collectionism" as such is part of the discussion, I think we both, myself as an anthropologist and Outpost as a community-oriented art center, will achieve common goals.

The Full Dollar Collection of Contemporary Art is developed through a partnership between:

]]>
Posted How the Full Dollar Collection of Contemporary Art Got its Start to Full Dollartag:www.kcet.org,2011:/socal/departures/community/fulldollar//1425.348092011-06-29T20:38:35Z2011-07-05T18:20:34ZFrom its start in Ecuador, to its current residency in Highland Park (Los Angeles), the who, what, when, where and why of the Full Dollar Collection of Contemporary Art.X Andradehttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1425&id=2892From the book Gráfica Popular, a survey of sign paintings throughout Ecuador.

This project started towards the end of 2009 as a result of my ethnographic interests on popular culture in Ecuador, and the dialogue sustained with different cultural producers involved with graphic design, anthropology, history, and contemporary art. My first systematic approach to sign painting was during 2007, after being invited by Juan Lorenzo Barragan (a graphic designer based in Quito), to participate in a photographic survey for a book on hand-made commercial signs across the country.

]]>
A group of photographers contributed to this project, including myself. In fact, I have collaborated with Barragan on two other books (one on the tradition of ritual masks, and other on 111 icons widely considered as symbols of "Ecuadorean" identity):

I decided to focus my efforts on the coastal region, near the port city of Guayaquil where I live, more specifically in Playas and its surroundings. Playas is a small town, which depends on commerce, fishery and small-scale, mainly local, tourism. Each year, during the summer season, I visit this town attracted both by its long beaches on the Pacific Ocean, and its chaotic urban layout. Until very recently, this dusty and dirty city had been marginal to state interventions on urban planning and development resulting on rather decaying streets, abandoned houses, and general disorder. At the same time, it is a vivid, colorful place mainly due to its great tropical weather, its welcoming people, and a laid back atmosphere. Being at the margins of modernization and the large-scale tourist industry, some of the people´s traditions are still pretty strong. One can easily stroll along the whole city, which I did, while taking snap shots of over a hundred sign paintings that served for the purposes of advertising a broad range of mainly mom-and-pop kind of businesses. From restaurants to gift shops, and from shoe repair retails to bordellos. After several trips, I noticed that "Don Pili" signed some of the nicest works, and so I decided to follow up on his trail until I found his tiny workshop right next to a soccer field.

Victor Hugo Escalante Yagual, a.k.a. "Don Pili", is a former fisherman of about 60 years of age. While fishing since a boy--the main occupation for people of his generation--he also worked making small handicrafts and helping his brother to paint boats upon request from fishermen of nearby towns. Boat painting, traditionally, mixes religious imagery with mass media images such as TV cartoons or political icons such as Che Guevara, and elaborate typography which is used to name a boat after its owner, his relatives, and/or a religious patron.

For the last 30 years, Don Pili has devoted himself to the task of sign painting. In very recent years, he started working for the municipal government of Playas doing all types of related assignments such as painting walls, political propaganda, and advertisement for public works sponsored by the local administration.

Upon publication of the book Gráfica Popular (Quito, Dinediciones, 2007), which included assorted photographs of Don Pili´s work amongst hundreds of other sign painters in Ecuador, I decided to continue fostering a friendship with Don Pili. I found him very easy going, self-reflexive about his craft, and open to future collaborations, making him an ideal informant for ethnographic work on popular culture. In fact, it was his sense of pride about his mastery at mural painting that stroke me the most. When I conducted the photographic survey of his work in Playas, he pointed to the fact that his most superb pieces had been commissioned by brothels´ owners, and decided to take a tour of them in order to include pictures in the book.

Confronted with wall-to-wall, impressive, murals of almost naked female models, it was the first time that I was actually witnessing sort of a permanent solo exhibition of Don Pili's most powerful pieces. While taking photographs in 3 or 4 brothels, it seemed to me that the whole display resembled a one-man museum. Considering my interests on contemporary art, an idea started to take form amid my amusement: to develop a critique on the practices of art collecting through the language of sign painting. Conceptually, the point of departure was to visualize the unequal relations of power between what is considered "art", on one hand, and "craft", on the other, by assembling a modest but somewhat representative, collection of reproductions of well-known works made by world-famous artists. A collection with a twist, though: Don Pili would have to reinterpret each piece while reading them as motives for commercial advertising. Isolated works will not serve for my purposes. I was not interested on originality and authenticity, on the contrary, the serial character of image reproduction-derived from traditional sign painting and the standardization of icons to convene defined commercial messages-was the key which would hold the collection together.

A simple reproduction of the original works was the painters' immediate understanding when I commissioned him in a first series of three paintings. That was too passive, I thought, since I wanted to enrich Don Pili's repertoire getting him more acquainted with "appropriation", a key strategy in contemporary art. Without a common visual and/or conceptual vocabulary to relate to, I explained that I wanted him to think about the originals as if they were actual business signs, and that they needed his actual intervention in terms of thinking the images as illustrations, sort of references for inspiring the visual representation of an actual service, store or commercial venue. Point blank, Don Pili´s only question at the time, besides size and painting materials, was regarding their future practical use and, therefore, their actual display: where the paintings would be hanged? He elaborated: inside the stores or outside on the walls? Alien to the notion of a museum or a gallery, the question was basically instrumental and practical. Drawing upon his own background on the craft and the function of images for advertising purposes, it was clear that he was providing an interpretation of my project on his own terms. That was our meeting point, disagreements and misunderstandings: I had in mind a gallery, while he foresaw a storefront. A silent agreement was reached, one finally based on the unequal distribution of power relations surrounding art, crafts, and popular culture.

We got started after settling several issues regarding prizes, sizes, advance payments, and deadlines. Of foremost importance for the project, we gradually managed to talk about the images in order to define the texts that would accompany them; agreement was reached after a careful discussion on which kind of store could gain from advertising a given image. A method was formulated in terms of general rules to follow:

An artwork will be chosen out of a previous pool of selected images elaborated by the ethnographer. I proceed with this based on my previous knowledge on contemporary art, and the celebrity of certain artists on the global market.

Don Pili should propose the main potential use of a given painting taking into consideration the literal message that a selected original piece of art could suggest for commercial purposes.

Texts will be chosen to accompany the image as if meant to decorate a storefront, advertising a specific service or business.

The name of the original artist or the title of an original piece will be used as an inspirational source to accomplish the former task.

The originals were selected from a Taschen book on Collecting Contemporary Art, which would serve as the main reference for The Full Dollar Collection. This is not a specialized book on art history; it is rather an assemblage of interviews meant to target wanna-be collectors. Its cost in Ecuador is about one third of the minimal wage of a worker, such as Don Pili's, monthly salary. Its luxurious presentation, and the snobbish tone from the telling series of interviews with assorted power players in the contemporary art scene, this book called my attention because it provides an insider view of the art world from whom actually makes more money out of it, i.e. private collectors, gallery owners, merchants, dealers, and all sort of advisors. Both the grandiloquence and crudeness of some of the testimonies stroke me particularly since I operate in the art-world from a marginal place such as Ecuador.

Again, the dialogue amongst Don Pili and myself about the relationship between words and images was telling about the different, somewhat conflicting, perspectives on my project as a whole. To begin with, "contemporary art" is a completely empty label for Don Pili; in fact he had not seen a single one of the "master pieces" included in the reference book before hand. Having not a clue about the artists' work or, by that matter, of art history, it seemed to me a clear advantage. His lack of knowledge on the subject would serve Don Pili to freely associate the originals with the instrumental side of The Full Dollar Collection of Contemporary Art: to produce what resemble actual signs, and to dig upon what he knew best, that is to make sign paintings, only this time using unfamiliar images as iconographic references. Instead of drawing upon his repertoire for illustrating food dishes, hair saloons, mini-markets, restaurants, bars, tailor shops, bazaars, schools, hospitals, churches, night clubs, and brothels, this time he would have to use some of the most expensive works elaborated by globally known artists. Far from being naive, Don Pili's take on those images was based on a repertoire previously constructed by gazing mainly other sign painters, and photographs and advertising used in newspapers and magazines.

The first three commissioned pieces were an installation by Paul McCarthy, a painting by Gilbert and George, and a sculpture by Sarah Lucas

(Left) Don Pili's take of a painting by Gilbert and George, (right) and of an installation by Paul McCarthy.

After a month or so for accomplishing this assignment, I returned to Playas to pick up the series. To my initial deception, Don Pili produced what it seemed to me a highly standarized set of reproductions. He was more concerned with showing his skills at providing faithful copies of the originals. Indeed, he made several remarks on how great resemblance they actually have to each other. The letters, on the other hand, were flat and plain, and used a formulae that it seemed to him was the less possibly intrusive on the images as such (yellow letters over a blue background on the lower part of the image). Working as separate captions, he wanted to keep the lettering apart from the figures in order to avoid superposition or contamination. He wanted the painting as a whole to be easily read by people, to fulfill-what he understood was-the goal of advertising in actual storefronts.

Again, my gaze was encapsulated on "art" while Don Pili's was fixed on street "signs".

Showing creativity for him was to highlight his own skills as a self-taught artist: to paint as good as a famous painter (never mind that he provided renderings of photographic reproductions of an installation, a sculpture, and a painting). The closer he could get there, the better, from his perspective. On the other hand, creativity for me was exploring Don Pili's own form of image-making and the aesthetical code that he embraced, what I have seen depicted on walls all along Playas. As for the first results, the pictures created by Don Pili were, however, both promising and intriguing. Even though they betrayed my expectations for "originality", they were entirely new works of art. Even though Don Pili has hidden his legacy as a typographer, the captions worked as powerful, critical, commentaries.

Over the next months and during the first half of 2010, further conversations developed in order to assure that Don Pili would show his full skills at typography for the following series. I wanted him to explore on his own visual vocabulary inasmuch as possible, and also to highlight the mix of colors that form part of the classic repertoire in which sign painted letters are decorated. Also, I wanted him to develop a totally independent reading of the originals. Their meaning for the artists that have created them was irrelevant, never asked upon, and never discussed. Neither it was of importance the artists, their intentions, their status, or their background. Actual images were selected and negotiated before a new series was commissioned mainly on the basis of their potential use for advertising.

At one point, I left the book with Don Pili for a few weeks in order for him to fully scrutinize it and select whatever image called his attention. Written in English, the intellectual context in which collection as practice was discussed was also entirely missing for the painter. Detachment from art history was both a conscious strategy on my part, and Don Pili's. He seemed delighted with the idea of reproducing "masters", yet another way to show his authority as a self-made, professional painter, and to highlight his status as a local legend amongst his colleagues both in Playas and the small region of the city´s immediate influence on tiny, isolated villages such as Engabao and Puerto El Morro. Some symbolic and economic capital was gained for Don Pili in this enterprise, as I have expanded my anthropological understanding on image-making while witnessing a crucial feature of popular culture in the making: its infinite capacity to incorporate the most disparate influences.

Instead of taking it as a fixed, out of history, entity, the project The Full Dollar Collection of Contemporary Art (2009-present) attest to the possibilities of expanding the dialogue between ethnography (with its well-known interest for actual people, concrete locations, different perceptions on visual memory, and the social life of images) and contemporary art. As of June 2011, the collection is composed of approximately 15 original paintings by Don Pili (most of them are household paint on wood, size: 1.20 cmts. by 80 cmts). Besides the three above mentioned, it is worth including some of the works commissioned for the purpose of properly contextualizing this ongoing project. Besides Gilbert and George, Sarah Lucas, and Paul Mc McCarthy, I am proud to own appropriated works by the names of Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Lisa Yaskabage, Mariko Mori, and Martin Kippenberger, amongst others. All of them original Victor Hugo Escalante Yagual's artworks. Five pieces of the collection were exhibited in May 2010, at an independent space in Lima, Peru, as part of a collective show of Guayaquilean artists dealing with the notion of "visual contamination".

While criticizing idealized notions of "authenticity" in the anthropology of popular culture, this project also served to foster my own critical stance towards the market-oriented world of contemporary art. Discussing some of the effects of juxtaposition and appropriation is a productive way to approach the collection created so far. Indeed, part of what Don Pili achieved on the series--which continues to develop as of June, 2011 (with renderings of the likes of John Currin, Richard Prince, Damien Hirst, Raymond Pettibon, and Charles Ray)--is to exploit a key feature, in fact one of the main staples of traditional sign painting: the hilarious, the capacity to create laughter out of mixing images and texts from different sources, to ridicule art collecting as a practice, and to mock the snobbish stance derived from the link between economic power, private property, and the commercial value upon which contemporary art as a global market holds nowadays.

I foresee the Outpost residency as an opportunity to develop some of these ideas in a completely different setting, and, in some ways at least, to take them to the next stage. I see a possibility to visualize different traditions of sign painting in the Los Angeles area of Highland Park, to dialogue with professional sign painters of diverse painting backgrounds, artists of different stages on their careers, and business owners, in order to create works that will have a functional purpose as means of advertising for storefronts. Making clear the possibilities of contemporary art for confronting unequal relations that are inherent to the field is part of my goal. Being an anthropologist rather than an artist, part of my mission is to foster research on sign painting, to dialogue with students and to develop an ethnographic look at this legacy. Photographic surveys of Highland Park´s storefronts, and further debates on the social life of these images in the competing visual economy of advertising, is a key part to a project that was born in ethnography and, at the end, I hope, will go back to anthropology.

As in the past, projects sponsored by Full Dollar, since 2004 my ghost enterprise in the contemporary art circuits, will involve assorted collaborators. Artists and non-artists will engage in developing this space of multiple encounters and disagreements. The translation of The Full Dollar Collection of Contemporary Art into a completely different setting (from the village of Playas, Ecuador, to the megalopolis of Los Angeles, USA), by the mediation of an art institution such as Outpost for Contemporary Art, will open an entire new set of questions, methods, negotiations, and debates along the process. At the core of all these, issues of authorship, power, and conflict will emerge: between ethnography and art, between art and crafts, between crafts and popular culture, and, in turn, between popular culture and contemporary art. How much of the origins of this project, with its clearly critical and political aims, will be kept on its next reincarnation in Los Angeles is an open question due to issues of history and context, and, of course, the ambivalent magic that surrounds an art institution.